But she was kneeling in the shrine of the dead, staring at the wall where Romeo’s name was carved. Runajo saw her through the doorway and didn’t dare go inside, didn’t dare make a sound.
What right did she have?
She went back to her room alone. She thought, In seven hours, I will have to give her the order.
Sunjai hadn’t sent any message. The calculations weren’t finished. Lord Ineo believed he was doing his best for clan and city.
There was no way out.
She didn’t sleep. She tried for a little while, but then she got up again.
Runajo wasn’t afraid. Her mind was completely calm. She knew what she had to do, and she knew that she would do it.
But her body was afraid. Waves of cold-hot fear washed through her stomach, and if she sat still for too long, her hands started shaking.
She tried to calm herself. She took deep breaths, and she told herself what she always had when she was afraid: I can pay any price. I can renounce any love. I can bear any terror.
But it had been one thing to tell herself that when she was entering the Sisterhood, when she was scheming to risk her life entering the Sunken Library. Now, she wasn’t the one paying the price.
Your heart is stone, she told herself savagely, remembering how she had abandoned her mother’s dead body to sneak into the Sisterhood before the rest of her family could stop her. You are pure obsidian inside your chest.
But it wasn’t true. Perhaps it had never been true.
Sometime in the trackless middle of the night, she finally started crying.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t bear it.
She wasn’t the one who would be holding the sword or the knife; how could she pity herself for this?
All her life, Runajo had been terrified of dying: the silence and the ending. The absolute, utter nothing—because she had always believed that her people were right, that her parents had ceased to exist the moment they died and that someday she would too. She remembered lying awake at night, sick with fear over it.
Now she imagined it: her heart slowing. Her breath stopping. Choking, infinite darkness. Nothing, nothing, nothing forever, and it still had the power to make her heart flutter in fear.
If she could pretend that she was already dead, that she no longer existed, maybe she could get through this.
When the sky began to pale with approaching dawn, Runajo stood up. She washed and dressed herself as carefully as the morning she had gone to the palace of the Exalted.
The walk to the shrine felt like it took forever. The morning sun seemed very bright; every line of the building, every pebble on the ground scraped at her eyes, razor-sharp. Her mind skittered through every link in the chain of logic that had brought her here, and she couldn’t find a break, couldn’t find a place where she could have changed things.
Unless she had cut Juliet’s throat when the Sisters of Thorn ordered her to. Unless she had dared to walk into the Mouth of Death when she had the chance.
When she opened the door of the shrine, Juliet looked up at her. She hadn’t moved from her place on the floor. Her face was pale, her eyes bloodshot with exhaustion.
There were a thousand things that Runajo wanted to say: I’m sorry and I have to and Run, just run, I order you to run away from us all.
But she opened her mouth and said, “Juliet. I order you to go with Subcaptain Xu, obey her orders for the length of today, and protect the sacrifice.”
14
JULIET KNEW THE FIRST PRISONER, when Xu’s guards brought him out into the narrow white hallway of the garrison. She wasn’t sure that she’d ever exchanged ten words with him, but she knew him at a glance: Amando Mavarinn Catresou. Lord Lutreo’s second son, and Paris’s older brother.
He would have been a guest at the ceremony where Paris became her Guardian. If she had stayed.
The few times she’d seen him before, he’d always been lurking a step behind his older brother, Meros, smirking at something he’d said. Now he was thinner, and paler, and not smiling at all as the guards dragged him out, hands shackled together.
“You—you’ll pay for this!” he shouted, struggling against them. “My brother will see you all punished! He’ll tear you to pieces, he’ll—” He wrenched against the guard holding him and nearly broke free; then the guard slammed a fist into his gut and he sank to the ground.
“Don’t hit him,” Xu said sharply. “Why don’t you already have the bloodwine here?”
Juliet looked at Amando. Their gazes met, and his eyes were wide with panic, but he found the strength for a sneer.
The compulsion hummed in her spine, cold and unforgiving. She would see him dead. She would not be able to stop it.
“Let me do it,” she said, and snatched the flask of drugged wine from the guard who had just come running.
She knelt in front of Amando. “I’ll say the prayers for you,” she whispered. “I promise. Just drink this and it won’t hurt.”
“Traitor,” he panted. “You’re not one of us. You—”
“Enough,” said Xu. With one hand, she gripped his head by the hair and tilted it back; with the other, she pinched his nose shut. Juliet poured the wine; Amando struggled and choked, but in the end he had to drink it.
“Hate you,” he said when they released him, his voice already starting to slur. In another minute he was completely docile, his pupils huge, his mouth slack. The guards hauled him to his feet and he went obediently, swaying but not struggling.
“Bring out the next one,” said Xu.
One by one, nineteen more prisoners were brought out—women as well as men, because the Mahyanai had no honor, of every age from barely adult to doddering on their feet with the weight of their years. Some fought the bloodwine like Amando; others clutched at the cup and gulped it down, desperate to escape the pain that waited for them.
All became the same: wide-eyed, wordless, stumbling, and obedient. Like dumb animals led to slaughter. Fury strangled Juliet, because this was what the rulers of Viyara did, what they thought holy: human lives reduced to cheap fodder for the walls.
“Good,” said Xu, when all twenty prisoners had been drugged. “Let’s get this over with.”
She didn’t sound like she thought she was preparing for a sacred rite, but Juliet doubted the subcaptain had any real guilt. She was clearly Old Viyaran through and through; she probably just hated Lord Ineo’s meddling.
“What are your orders?” she asked, under her breath.
Xu looked her up and down. “Guard the sacrifice and don’t run mad.”
Juliet had been to the Great Offering twice a year as long as she could remember. It was required of all who held rank in the three high houses—Mahyanai, Catresou, and Old Viyaran. They came, and they took turns bringing the victim for sacrifice.
The Great Offering was a festival. It was held in the grand court at the center of the Upper City; it was begun with songs and dancing, attended by vast crowds. Many held feasts afterward, though the Catresou never did.
This sacrifice was still held in the grand court, where the vast obsidian face of the god Ihom grew out of the wall, looming over a dais of white stone. There was still a crowd that had gathered to watch.
But it was no festival. There was no singing, no dancing, no ranks of white-robed Sisters of Thorn. Only three Sisters had come, with red bands on their sleeves and knives in their hands. The Exalted was not there, and neither was Lord Ineo; and of course, there were no Catresou at all.
Except Juliet.
And the prisoners.
Amando was first in line, and Juliet walked beside him. He stumbled as they led him forward, and nearly fell; the guards had to hold him up. His eyes were still wide and sightless with the drugs. Juliet tried to comfort herself that at least he wouldn’t suffer.
It was no comfort.
Go swiftly and in gladness.
She breathed the words, barely moving her lips, barely more than thinking them. Amando wouldn’t hear th
e prayer anyway; the important thing was that it be said. That in the middle of this obscene ritual, one thing be done right.
Forget not thy name, in all the dark places.
The altar was ten steps away. Then nine. The prisoners were not afraid, but Juliet was: with every step, the cold dread hung heavier in her stomach, and her heart pounded with the need to run, run, run—
But Runajo’s orders sang coldly in her blood, driving her toward the altar.
Forget not those who have walked before thee.
Eight steps away.
She could see sunlight glinting on the knife.
Seven. Six. Five.
Heed not the nameless, who crawl and weep—
And that was when the Catresou attacked.
She would have seen it earlier if she hadn’t been staring at the Sister’s knife. Instead, she didn’t notice until they burst out of the crowd, swords glinting. And she felt one heartbeat of hope as she thought both, That’s a bad strategy and Maybe they can do it anyway.
Then the whole world narrowed down to Runajo’s order: Protect the sacrifice.
Juliet seized Amando by the arm, hauled him the last few steps, four-three-two-one, and flung him onto the altar all in one motion, before vaulting it to stand sword out on the other side.
“Kill him now!” she yelled at the Sisters, and then two of the Catresou were upon her with swords. They were both tall, well-muscled men, and they moved with the grace and confidence of those who had survived serious duels.
But they weren’t the Juliet.
It took her only moments to drop them.
She heard shouts, and at the edge of her vision she saw bright white lines flare across the ground. She knew that meant the Sister had managed to cut Amando’s throat, but there was no time to think about it. She was already turning to meet the next opponent.
There was blood on his sword, but she didn’t feel the awful drive to kill him; if his last opponent had been one of the Mahyanai guards, he hadn’t killed him.
But her heart still pounded against her ribs. Because it was the boy she had fought on the night of the Catresou raid. She knew him instantly from the line of his jaw, the way he held his sword, and her heart wrenched within her because here in the sunlight, he looked so like Romeo, who was dead and never returning to her.
It felt like a mockery of the dead.
She had to unmask him.
This time when she attacked, she was actually trying to win. But he was just as good as she remembered, maybe even better, and though she drove him back, he was still countering all her strokes. He didn’t have her strength or speed, but he had a terrifying intuition for how she would move.
As if he knew her, as Romeo had known her.
Traceries of light flared along the ground again—another successful sacrifice—but Juliet didn’t care about anything now except stopping this treacherous boy. With a snarl, she lunged forward, and this time she got inside his defense, pressed her sword to his throat.
He went still. She was close enough, she could see his eyes widen through the slits in his mask.
Then she ripped the mask from his face.
The world seemed to stop.
Romeo looked back at her. Romeo, who was dead, who was not Catresou, who had no desire to fight, who was dead.
And could not possibly be standing before her.
“Juliet,” he said, and it was his voice. She would know that voice, though they had been parted a thousand years.
“You were dead,” she whispered, and for one instant, one horrible instant, she thought that perhaps he was like Paris, raised again as a mindless slave—
But Romeo’s eyes were too alive and too haunted as he whispered, “I nearly was. I thought you were, and then—when I found out what my people had done, that you wouldn’t forgive me—”
“You fool,” she said. “You utter and absolute fool.”
She lowered her sword from his throat, and one-handed, dragged him into a kiss.
This was the truth at the heart of the world: Romeo was hers and she was his. Even now, with battle around them and blood on their swords, both of them exhausted and panting for breath—when their lips touched, the world melted and reformed around them. There were no clans and no feud. She wasn’t a weapon, bloody and guilty. He wasn’t her enemy. She was nothing except his, every part of her, and this boy, this dizzying delight, was all hers.
For one moment.
Then she tasted blood on his tongue.
Smelled it.
Fire seared through her veins, and it wasn’t desire, it was the need to kill, kill, kill.
She shoved him back. She was gasping and shaking and she didn’t understand, because he hadn’t been guilty a moment ago—
Then she saw the Mahyanai guard lying too still on the ground. The blood on Romeo’s sword.
He had already dealt the stroke when he kissed her.
Romeo met her eyes.
“Run,” she whispered, and then her throat closed up as she fought against the power inside her, fought as she never had before, not even when it had been driving her to kill her own father.
But she was losing. In another heartbeat, she knew that she would move, she would hunt Romeo down and kill him, and she could not, she would not survive it—
A blow to her face sent her staggering back. She blinked, saw Subcaptain Xu, and the next moment Xu was behind her, arms wrapping her neck in a choke hold.
Juliet only had time to think, She knows how to use a blood choke, and then the world was dark.
Part II
How with This Rage
15
TWICE NOW JULIET HAD KNELT before Lord Ineo, listening to his fury. But this time, his fury was not directed only at her.
“Do I understand what you are telling me?” His voice was cold and remote. “Rather than subdue these rioters, you subdued one of the guards who might have stopped them?”
“You gave me a guard who was going to run mad at the sight of blood,” said Xu. She stood at attention, her back perfectly straight, her voice clipped and contemptuously polite. “Yes. I choked her out. I don’t allow any of my guards to disobey orders.”
Juliet could still feel Romeo’s lips against hers, could still taste the blood that stained him now. If she’d attacked him sooner, before he could hurt that guard—if she’d realized who he was the night of the raid—if he had only told her that he was alive—
And now there was no hope.
Romeo had escaped. She had learned that from Runajo. And now that he was far enough away, hidden in the Lower City, the compulsion didn’t drive her to search him out and destroy him. But if she ever saw him again—
“If you hadn’t stopped her,” said Lord Ineo, “she could have destroyed them all.”
“She could have.” Xu nodded. “I, for one, don’t trust battle frenzies created by Catresou magic, and I was the authority in that situation. You are the Exalted’s right hand. But you have no rank in the City Guard.” She bowed to him. “I’ll see you when you fancy another holy sacrifice. Good day, my lord.”
She turned crisply and strode out of the room.
Lord Ineo sighed, then looked to Runajo, who stood like a bloodless statue behind Juliet.
“May we go?” asked Runajo, her voice quiet and lifeless.
“There’s one other thing first,” said Lord Ineo. “People are already talking about the attack. They say that the Juliet kissed one of the attackers. Order her to tell me the truth about this.”
“Tell him,” said Runajo, again leaving Juliet free.
But this time, she wanted to tell him the truth.
She looked him in the eyes, and said, “I did. It was my duty to greet him with a kiss.”
Lord Ineo’s mouth flattened. “Explain.”
“He was Romeo,” said Juliet. “My husband. Your son. He’s alive. And now it’s my duty to kill him, my lord.”
For the first time Juliet could remember, Lord Ineo looked actually taken a
back. “That’s not possible.”
“I don’t know how he survived,” said Juliet. “But he fights for the Catresou now. He killed one of your kinsmen today. So I will assuredly kill him in return. That’s what having a Juliet means. Did you think—”
“Stop,” said Runajo.
Juliet’s mouth snapped shut. She knew taunting him was dangerous and she didn’t care; she was shaking from sheer satisfaction that finally, finally he was helpless.
Did he think the Juliet was a tool forged only for his convenience? He would find he was wrong.
Lord Ineo looked down at her, his face expressionless.
“I consider it very likely that, in your grief for Romeo, you are confused,” he said finally. “And anyone who has joined with the Catresou is no son of mine. Runajo, order her not to tell any of our people this fancy of hers.”
“Do not tell anyone that Romeo is alive,” Runajo said tonelessly.
“Good,” said Lord Ineo. “Runajo, we will talk later.” Then he swept out of the room.
They were alone together.
“Is it true?” Runajo waited a moment, then sighed and rubbed at her forehead. “You can speak. Was Romeo really there?”
“Yes,” said Juliet.
They were the only truths left in her life: that she loved Romeo, and she was going to kill him.
“I don’t understand,” said Runajo, and she sounded . . . brittle. Tired, in a way that Juliet had never heard before. “You said he died—”
“I was wrong,” said Juliet, and a harsh laugh ripped out of her. “He was alive, all this time. I would have gone to him, if I’d known. I would have cut my way out of the Cloister and waded through a river of blood to find him, and none of this would have happened. None of it.”
Everything had nearly been so different, and they’d never known. She had nearly saved Romeo from his fate of dying at her hands, and she’d never known.
Runajo drew a shuddering breath. Juliet remembered that she had known Romeo since she was a child, that they had been something like friends. That Runajo, too, had regrets.